Providing Operational Support to responders in Syria – Jonas Herzog (Geo4Dev 2018)

Jonas Herzog, Director of Research and Impact at TradeMark East Africa’s talk is titled: Providing Operational Support to responders in Syria iMMAP turns data into information and creates knowledge for decision makers operating in both development and humanitarian contexts, including situations of violence, post-disaster, and conflict recovery. Our mission is to harness the power of information to facilitate evidence-based decisions to improve people’s lives. Syria remains a complex humanitarian situation, with more than 6.1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), and 13.1 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the 2018 Humanitarian Needs Overview. iMMAP has been assisting humanitarian actors responding to the Syria crisis since 2011, focusing on providing critical information management support, including research and analysis, to coordination actors and operational partners. Such assistance contributes to enhancing the coordination of the whole-of-Syria response, leading to better identification of the needs and gaps in humanitarian assistance. iMMAP has been working on various projects using survey data, satellite imagery, and other contextual information to make the complex situation more understandable and to enable the humanitarian actors to provide the assistance to the most vulnerable people.

The 2nd Annual Symposium on Geospatial Analysis for International Development (Geo4Dev) focused on geospatial research that addresses climate- and conflict-driven migration and humanitarian response. This includes observation and modeling of migration and human settlement patterns (in response to climate or conflict stressors), as well as the design and evaluation of interventions for humanitarian crises, mass migration, and community resilience.

Geo4Dev is a yearly event focused on the use of novel geospatial data and analytic techniques to address issues of poverty, sustainable development, urbanization, climate change, and economic growth in developing countries and beyond. This includes a particular emphasis on the use of emerging geo-tagged big data, including satellite, social media, and CDR datasets.